The amount of information available on-line keeps growing at an ever accelerating pace. In many ways, this is a beneficial trend, and information is now available to help a typical user perform any number of typical tasks.
However, the very quantity of available information can be counter-productive. When a user performs an on-line search to find information relevant to a task that he is performing, he is often overwhelmed by the results: So many search “hits” are returned that the user may have a difficult time deciding which, if any, are the most relevant to the task at hand. While the user may have a high level of confidence that the information he needs can be found somewhere in the search results, this confidence does him little good if he cannot quickly sort through the mass of returned information to find the exact information that is most helpful to him.
This problem is exacerbated when the search results include videos. A user may be able to quickly scan and evaluate still images, but he may have to actually spend time viewing each video to determine if it is of interest to him. Rather than presenting video results one by one, various search engines provide multiple windows on the display screen of the user's device, where each window displays a small “thumbnail” of one video hit. This arrangement, however, often does not help the user to quickly scan through the videos: The multitude of simultaneous video thumbnails merely reinforces the user's sense of “information overload.”
As is well known, when a search engine retrieves a list of hits, it runs an algorithm to rank those hits according to some kind of relevance and then presents the hits to the user in an ordered ranking. With video results for example, the search engine may display thumbnails of only the “top” (that is, the most relevant as perceived by the search engine) four or five hits. However, the relevance-ranking algorithm used by the search engine may have little or nothing to do with the task that the user who requested the search is attempting to perform.